• mctoasterson@reddthat.comEnglish
    6 minutes

    If all AI really is classified as a “weapon” for export-control purposes, well… in the US possession of weapons is a protected individual right. The US gov should be training open weight models and encouraging self-hosting.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8 minutes

    The Western model was doomed to failure from the start. The only barrier to entry was being able to download thousands of TBs of internet archives/books and to have a lot of compute.

    The math for these models isn’t proprietary and most CS students are exposed to machine learning and neural networks while in school.

    The only advantage western companies had was the ability to buy up the entire hardware market, pricing out domestic competition, and to use their politicians to manipulate trade policy in order to restrict sales of critical hardware to China.

    Every US tech company has dumped billions investing in an unsustainable business model with the hope of buying a global monopoly by strangling competition.

    China can destroy all of that by making their models open weight. The real money is in finding and implementing custom AI solutions… not in charging for access to the models. By having freely available models, they’re making the barrier of entry as low as possible.

    Not to mention that the insane amount of money being poured into hardware by US tech companies has created an environment where building fabs has a much shorter ROI, which also helps China’s development in that sector.

    US companies are playing Monopoly while China is playing Civilization.

  • nkat2112@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2 hours

    The article wastes no time getting to the underlying point in the very first paragraph:

    Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models.

    I found the following two paragraphs interesting:

    By mid-2026, however, open-weight frontier models from Chinese labs such as Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI had nearly matched the leading Western models in intelligence and performance. Many companies have already begun building their AI systems on top of these free models, avoiding the high cost of closed-model APIs.

    Because businesses can host open-weight models in their own private clouds, they can also avoid sending proprietary data to systems controlled by outside providers. Developers can fine-tune the models for specific needs, build applications and tools on top of them, and optimize them for their preferred infrastructure.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      they can also avoid sending proprietary data to systems controlled by outside providers.

      Not only proprietary but also personal or other kinds of sensitive data.
      If you are doing health research on databases of personal health data, you should be able to guarantee the safety of that data.
      That means you can’t use the current American systems, because they’ve been shown to be insecure.
      This would be a major issue in EU, where such data is legally protected.

      • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
        2 hours

        This would be a major issue in EU, where such data is legally protected.

        Nothing a EU–US Data Privacy Framework can’t handle.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 hours

          I absolutely agree that that agreement is complete and utter bullshit.
          Hopefully the shift there has been to achieve IT independence from USA will mean EU doesn’t give in so easy next time.

      • cavitationfetishist2@quokk.auEnglish
        2 hours

        These people are too rich to be punished by laws. They’re the people laws protect not the ones they bind.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 hour

          Not in EU, Eu has given fines to those big tech companies before and can do it again.

  • Greg Clarke@lemmy.caEnglish
    2 hours

    I just wish I could buy enough memory to run one of these models locally. Specially Kimi K3

    • Dionysus@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1 hour

      Same, getting ~3 trillion parameters in consumer hardware is rough.

      If Nvidia has any foresight they’ll see the writing on the wall and start getting higher memory Spark style SMB inference machines, few people in the long run are going to pay retail API token costs,

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 hours

    is their a meaningful difference between open weight and open source?

    • herrvogel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      Pretty big difference. An open weight model is a model that you can run on your own machine. You just download and it’s yours to host and use. You don’t need to have anyone host it on their own backend for you, the entire model is available to you to do that on your own. What you don’t have is any control over or access to anything related to how the model was trained. You don’t know what kind of data they used to train it, and how exactly they used that dataset. If you did, that’d be an open source model.

  • cavitationfetishist2@quokk.auEnglish
    2 hours

    Okay but what about the fact all of this is useless bullshit that will only make the world worse?

    • keimevo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23 minutes

      It’s far from useless. Overblown, for sure.

      They made an awesome hammer that can solve many hammer-related tasks, but they’re selling it like it can also cook, drive and keep the house clean.

      Blame the companies, not the math.